Reliable Journal Swings for the Fence but Falls Short of Home Run

It is likely that you’ve heard of it already. TriQuarterly is a magazine in the big leagues, and it usually brings along at least a few heavy hitters. Issue 153 is no exception. Upon loading up the page, one of the first names you notice in the dugout is none other than the current poet laureate, Tracy K. Smith.

So, maybe, like in my case, that excites you, and you leapfrog over the introduction and some otherwise fascinating video essays (especially Emma Sheinbaum’s “It’s You,” which stands out as one of the simplest and, simultaneously, most honest pieces in this issue) to Smith’s three contributions, and before you know it, you’re on your fourth hotdog of the inning, and you turn to ask your American friend, who talked you into going to this in the first place, just how long is this thing?

Because the truth is, while excellent and far from a disappointment, ultimately, more than a guiding star, Smith is a bit of a symptom of this issue’s main problem: it never hits a homerun. Which means it is hard to fall in love with TriQuarterly if you’re not already rooting for this endeavor.

That being said, there is plenty of reason to start rooting. While no single piece in this issue may knock it out of the park, the majority of them do an entertaining job, and a few are even bound to hit you straight in the heart.

Aside from Sheinbaum, the first to attempt just that is Kristen Arnett’s “Suggestible Hauntings,” an intriguing story about two professional haunters and their relationship, and for the most part, with the exception of how and why the actual business is run, it doesn’t wear out its main conceit. The first piece to really connect, however, at least in this reader’s case, was Brandi Wells’ curveball of a story, “Not Mildred.”

Personally, my first encounter with Wells was many years ago in Blue Stem Magazine and her unparalleled “Giant Mutant Kittens,” and though her scope is wider and focus sharper in “Not Mildred,” and she’s obviously grown as a writer in the meantime, becoming more attuned to the unspoken things between her characters, she has lost none of her wit and only doubled down on her certain brand of sympathetic scorn. She is, for all intents and purposes, the Yogi Berra of this issue. If that speaks to you as it does to me, then maybe check out one or two of the video essays, stop by Esther Lin’s two poems, give Joy Baglio’s inventive flash story “We Are Trying to Understand You” a quick look, read “Not Mildred” over a cup of whatever you enjoy, and then maybe consider checking out.

To be fair, I’m being unfair. TriQuarterly is not meant to be enjoyed in a spurt. It’s probably not even meant to be read in its entirety. TriQuarterly, quite incongruously, is published semi-annually, and it’s not afraid to take its time and throw a lot of different stuff at you, so much so that, though generally well-edited, the longer you get through the issue, the more typos start cropping up (e.g. extra spaces at the start of paragraphs, minor inconsistencies between the words read aloud by the poets and the poems presented). If you’re lucky, something sticks; if you’re not, at least you got to enjoy a great turn of phrase here and there along the way.

The sheer amount of stuff on display—from Frédérique Guétat-Liviani’s ramshackle poem, “the young barbarian girl,” translated from the French by Nathanaël, to Caroline Beimford’s intriguing deep-dive essay into prepper culture in northwest Arkansas in the unfortunately titled, “We Who Are About to Die Salute You”—also means there’s little sense of any overarching theme building throughout the issue. Aside from that all-purpose (and mostly justified) reproach of the current political situation in the US manifest in pretty much every litmag these days, there is little guiding the reader towards any kind of grander insight. Wells’ story, one of the first in the issue, does this best of all, and it’s not that everything is downhill from there, but it does more or less plateau.

In the introduction, which is actually just an introduction to the three video essays at the top of the issue, Sarah Minor, TriQuarterly’s film editor, claims the videos aim to “productively unsettle” the reader, that each “prompts us to notice ourselves as watchers of another. Each asks what exactly it is we think we don’t recognize there.”

And she is not wrong. Whether purposefully or not, in the majority of works presented, the reader is forever left on the sidelines, never invited to join in, and moreover, in most cases, neither is the narrator. Case in point, returning to Tracy K. Smith, in “Driving to Ottawa,” the first poem of the issue, she talks of “this tone of voice, the hush / Of people talking about someone”, in “Beatific,” the poem right after, she opens, “I watch him bob across the intersection, / Squat legs bowed in black sweatpants. / I watch him smile at nobody, at our traffic”, and in “Charity,” the one after that, “She is like a squat old machine / Off-kilter but still chugging along / The uphill stretch of sidewalk / On Harrison Street, handbag slung / Crosswise and, I’m guessing, heavy.”

So, this is obviously a conscious choice by the writers and the editors, just as it is anyone’s choice to go and spend a day on that American pastime and, if you so desire, leave before the end of the game. In the end, reading issue 153 of TriQuarterly is a bit like watching Donald Glover’s career. They can seemingly do pretty much whatever they set their minds to, there’s usually purpose in the stuff they do, and they do have a lot to say and, if necessary, they’re not afraid to take their time to say it, but through it all, there’s this nagging sensation that no one is really having any fun.

And also a bit like Glover, TriQuarterly has aged rather well. Contrary to most other old dogs on the block, it is quite comfortable online, in terms of both presentation—they even have a cool timeline feature, which, however, apart from this issue, hasn’t really been updated in the past year—and content, including the aforementioned video essays as well as audio files of poets reading aloud their poetry. In addition to that, there’s also the more standard fare, such as an archive of contributors and a delightfully big button (rarer than it ought to be) taking you to their Submittable page.

Unfortunately, they’re also quite comfortable charging for submissions. They also “receive thousands of submissions every year,” and their “response time is approximately six months,” while they ostensibly offer an impressively nebulous “honoraria for published work.” On the other hand, their 5000-word limit on prose seems to be more a guideline than a hard rule, at least taking into consideration Christian Winn’s “The Evidence of Reno” in this issue, which far exceeds that, and though, as with everything else, the story is quite excellent, one is left to wonder whether Winn paid to submit a piece so obviously over the word limit, or if perhaps it was commissioned.

Ultimately, TriQuarterly won’t surprise you, and for the most part, it doesn’t aim to. It’s got its bases covered, it is professional and well-edited except for a few stumbles here and there, the layout is straightforward and intuitive, it doesn’t bog itself down in an overly long About page, and it doesn’t take many risks that it can’t afford to take. It has class, though not as much flourish as one might hope for, and only occasionally wins you over.